Candidate quality in a Downsian model with a continuous policy space (Q423710)

Candidate quality is generally considered to be a critical variable in electoral competition. All else constant, high quality candidates will fare better than low quality candidates. Furthermore, quality differences produce significant changes in the nature of political competition. The equilibrium properties of spatial competition between two candidates who differ in quality have been analyzed theoretically in a number of recent papers. The main contribution of this paper is to characterize the unique equilibrium strategies for a Downsian model with an advantaged candidate when the policy space is continuous. The authors show that the features of this equilibrium are in line with those of the equilibria found for similar models. More precisely, this paper characterizes a unique mixed strategy Nash equilibrium in a one-dimensional Downsian model of two-candidate elections with a continuous policy space, where candidates are office motivated and one candidate enjoys a non-policy advantage over the other candidate. It is shown that if voters' utility functions are concave and the median voter ideal point is drawn from a unimodal distribution, there is a mixed strategy Nash equilibrium where the advantaged candidate chooses the ideal point of the expected median voter with probability 1 and the disadvantaged candidate uses a mixed strategy that is symmetric around it. Existence conditions require the variance of the distribution to be small enough relative to the size of the advantage.